Can a byte be more than eight bits?

Question

Programming

Good afternoon!
Recently I saw a tutorial on OOP 2012. Intrigued, I decided to take a look.
In one of the parts, I heard that a byte is not necessarily 8 bits , that there may be other variations.
Today, in my techie, we were given to write all sorts of elementary things that I had studied or read before.
I didn’t check whether it was correct or not in the tutorial that the person said about the byte, asked the teacher: “why is it written here (in the book on C ++ builder) that a byte is 8 bits? After all, there are architectures with a different number of bits in a byte. "
To which I received the answer: "Byte is 8 bits and only" (with a smile *)
I answered the same - a smile with an element of cleverness.
I didn't start arguing because I knew that if I started arguing:
Firstly, I will not prove anything, since I heard recently and was not very familiar with this news.
Secondly, a teacher is a teacher, and therefore there is some kind of discrimination between a student (schoolchild) and a teacher - it is conditional and this discrimination is the life (everyday) of our system in general, i.e. I want to say that the significance of the student’s word for the teacher is less than the teacher's word for the student.
Thirdly, the teacher was taught exactly "that way" and therefore this paragraph refers to the previous one.
I looked on wikipedia and couldn't find a definitive answer.
Are there currently architectures or implementations that do not equal 8 bits per byte?
Are there any articles on this topic to understand more?
I was right? Should the teacher prove something?

Answer 1

I looked at Wikipedia, I did not find a definite answer for myself.

Strange, I see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#History
Exist. But most likely they are all in museums. Although the RFC generally still writes octet instead of byte ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_ (computing)).
What's the point of wasting time? These are dead architectures. Now in practice to meet such is improbable.

Answer 2

In Knuth's bicycle pseudo-architecture, bytes are 6 bits, for example.